Richard Feynman is misunderstood | Grant Sanderson and Lex Fridman

you've spoken about richard feynman as someone you admire i think last time we spoke we ran out of time so i wanted to talk to you about him who is uh richard feynman to you in your eyes what impact did he have on you i mean i think a ton of people like feynman he's probably it's a little bit cliche to say that you like fineman right that's um almost like when you don't know what to say about sports and you just point to the super bowl or something is something you enjoy watching but i do actually think there's a layer to feynman that like sits behind the iconography one thing that just really struck me was this letter that he wrote to his wife two years after she died so during the manhattan project she had polio tragically she died they were just young madly in love and you know the the icon of feynman is this almost this like mildly sexist womanizing philanderer at least on the personal side but you read this letter and i can try to pull it up for you if i want and it's just this absolutely heartfelt letter to his wife saying how much he loves her even though she's dead and kind of what she means to him how no woman can ever measure up to her and it shows you that the fineman that we've all seen in like shirley are joking is different from the feynman in reality and i think the same kind of goes in his science where you know he kind of sometimes has this output of being this awesox character like everyone else is coming in this with these fancy falutin formulas but i'm just gonna try to whittle it down to its essentials which is so appealing because we love to see that kind of thing but when you get into it like what he was doing was actually quite deep very much mathematical um that should go without saying but i remember reading a book about feynman in a cafe once and this woman looked at me and was like uh saw that it was about feynman she was like oh i love him i read julia you're joking and she started explaining to me how he was never really a math person and uh i don't understand how that can possibly be a public perception about any physicist but for whatever reason that like worked into his or that he sort of shoot off math in place of true science the reality of it is he was deeply in love with math and was much more going in that direction and had a clicking point into seeing that physics was a way to realize that and all the creativity that he could output in that direction um was instead poured towards things like fundamental not even fundamental theories just emergent phenomena and everything like that so to answer your actual question like what what i like about uh his way of going at things is this constant desire to reinvent it for himself like when he would consume papers the way he described it he would start to see what problem he was trying to solve and then just try to solve it himself to get a sense of personal ownership and then from there see what others had done is that how you see problems yourself like that's actually an interesting point when you first are inspired by a certain idea that you maybe want to teach or visualize or just explore on your own i'm sure you're captured by some possibility and magic of it do you read the work of others like do you go through the proof do you try to rediscover everything yourself so um i think the things that i've like learned best and have the deepest ownership of are the ones that have some element of rediscovery the problem is that really slows you down and this is for my for my part it's actually a big fault like this is part of why i'm i'm not an active researcher i'm not like at the depth of the field a lot of other people are the stuff that i do learn i try to learn it really well um but other times you do need to get through it at a certain pace you do need to get to a point of a problem you're trying to solve so obviously you need to be well equipped to read things uh without that reinvention component and see how others have done it but i think if you choose a few core building blocks along the way and you say i'm really going to try to approach this before i see how this person went at it i'm really going to try to approach it for myself no matter what you gain all sorts of inarticulatable intuitions about that topic which aren't going to be there if you simply go through the proof for example you're going to be trying to come up with counter examples you're going to try to come up with intuitive examples all sorts of things where you're populating your brain with data and the ones that you come up with are likely to be different than the one that the text comes up with and that like lends it a different angle so that aspect also slowed finemen down in a lot of respects i think there was a period when like the rest of physics was running away from him um but in so far he's got it got him to where he was uh i i kind of resonate with that i just i would i would be nowhere near it because i not like him at all but it's like a state to aspire to you

Channel: Lex Clips

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Keywords: grant sanderson, artificial intelligence, ai, ai podcast, artificial intelligence podcast, lex clips, lex fridman, lex friedman, joe rogan, elon musk, lex podcast, lex mit, lex ai, mit ai, ai podcast clips, ai clips, deep learning, machine learning, computer science, engineering, physics, science, tech, technology, tech podcast, physics podcast, mathematics, math, math podcast, friedman, consciousness, philosophy, turing, einstein

Id: YrGuJ4Pkkuo

Length: 4min 49sec (289 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 25 2020